The present invention relates to the field of computer aided design (CAD). More specifically, the present invention relates to computer assistance to a designer working with identifiers of a drawing of a mechanical design.
Most mechanical designs require a designer to create a drawing to identify geometry pieces that make up components of a mechanical design. An example of components of a mechanical design is a nut and bolt assembly where the nut and bolt make up the components of the assembly. Once a designer has completed the geometry pieces of an assembly, the designer creates a display, usually in the form of a drawing, identifying the individual components that make up the assembly. For the purposes of this application, the geometry pieces that make up the components of a mechanical design are solid CAD geometry pieces and shall be generically referred to as geometry pieces.
Generally, identifying individual geometry pieces of an assembly is labor intensive requiring creation of an identifier, usually in the form of an identity symbol and a leader from the geometry piece to the identity symbol, for each geometry piece in separate sequence of commands, multiple executions of the same commands, and a large number of key strokes. Thus, as the number of geometry pieces of an assembly increases, the time required to identify the geometry pieces increases. Moreover, once the identifiers have been created, a users has difficulty changing the position of the identifier because the ordering of the geometry pieces would have to be manually changed to remain consistent with the identifier position.
Thus, a more user friendly approach for creating identifiers and manipulating identifiers of geometry pieces of an assembly is desired. As will be described in more detail below, the present invention achieves these and other desirable objectives, which will be apparent from the disclosure to follow.
Computer instructions that operate to determine if one or more geometry pieces of a mechanical design are within a view boundary and automatically generate and order one or more identifiers corresponding to the geometry pieces within the view boundary, when executed, is disclosed. In one embodiment, the computer instructions are part of a mechanical design software application. In one embodiment, the mechanical design software application including the computer instructions are embodied in a distribution storage medium.